Pelosi names Hannah Rosenthal to religious freedom body

Jewish Telegraphic Agency – Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the minority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, named Hannah Rosenthal, a longtime Jewish activist, to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.

Rosenthal, whose June 17 appointment was announced by USCIRF on Thursday, is the president of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation. She served in President Obama’s first term as the State Department’s special envoy to combat anti-Semitism and was in the 1990s and early 2000s the executive director for the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the umbrella body for Jewish public policy groups.

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent body that tracks religious freedoms overseas, has members appointed by leadership in both houses of Congress and by the president.

[Editor’s note: While Hannah Rosenthal has criticized what she sees as “ultra-conservative” elements of the pro-Israel movement, she was the executive director of a Zionist umbrella group that does not support religious freedoms for Palestinian Christians, Muslims, and other non-Jewish groups in Israel.

The Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) rallied against the rights of Palestinians on college campuses across the US, particularly during the IDF reoccupation of the West Bank during the Second Intifada. More recently, the JCPA passed a 2010 resolution against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS), warning that “unless effectively countered, over time it may have the corrosive effect of changing the culture of political discussion.”]

Posted by Philip Giraldi on Jun 20 2014 . Filed under Commentary & Analysis, Israeli/Jewish Press . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 . Both comments and pings are currently closed.